Disneyland is “the happiest place on Earth” . . . for communicable diseases, that is. The California theme park is at the epicentre of an outbreak of measles, one of the most contagious viruses known to man.

So far, 70 people have been infected, and hundreds more exposed, in an outbreak that has spread to six U.S. states and Mexico. Only five of those cases were among people known to be fully immunized with the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine. The rest had unknown status, had not kept up with their shots or were babies under one year old—too young to have been immunized yet.

Measles causes high fever, headache, runny nose and eyes, general malaise, hacking cough and a telltale red, spotted rash all over the body that may or may not be itchy. It spreads very easily from person to person via coughing and sneezing, and can hang around in the air for hours after a sick person has left the room. If you’re susceptible and sharing the living space of someone with measles, there’s a 90 per cent chance you’ll catch it too. Complications such as pneumonia and encephalitis are fairly common and can be deadly, especially in young children and people with pre-existing medical conditions.

Canada once saw hundreds of thousands of cases of measles each year, but the virus has been virtually unheard of in the Americas since the World Health Organization declared it eradicated in 2002. The outbreaks that still pop up from time to time generally get started when a case is imported from a country such as the Philippines, where measles still roams free. Given the number of people who travel far and wide to see Mickey Mouse, it’s not surprising that this spate of cases started at Disneyland.

It’s also not a coincidence that California has been repeatedly hit by outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases. Vaccine coverage is dangerously low in parts of the state, thanks to the anti-vaccine movement.

In California’s Santa Monica-Malibu school district, 11.5 per cent of parents refuse to vaccinate their kids. In nearby Orange County, the figure is 8.6 per cent. In Beverly Hills it’s five per cent—almost, but not quite, a safe level of vaccine coverage.

In a large study that observed measles infections in the Netherlands over decades, scientists calculated that 95.7 per cent of a population needs to be immune to measles to prevent regular outbreaks. And since no vaccine is perfectly effective, even more than that number need to be vaccinated to protect the whole community. That’s what herd immunity is: Without a good-sized population of susceptible humans to attack, viruses such as measles just don’t circulate as much, and that protects babies under one year old and others who aren’t able to get the vaccine or don’t respond to it.

Measles reared its red spotty head in Canada in the not-so-distant past, and mumps recently made a comeback among young, healthy NHL players. Many Canadians born after 1970 and before 1992 have only had one MMR vaccine, and need a second dose to be fully protected. If you don’t know if you’ve had your second dose, you might qualify for a catch-up shot, especially if you got to high school or university, work with kids, old or sick people, are planning to travel internationally or are a woman of childbearing age. (Rubella, the R in MMR, can cause serious birth defects if contracted during pregnancy.)

]]>The park earned 109 million Hong Kong dollars ($14 million) in the year that ended Sept. 29 and its revenue jumped 18 per cent to HK$4.27 billion ($550 million). The park drew 6.73 million visitors, 13 per cent more than the previous year, with guests spending 6 per cent more than a year earlier.

The struggling park’s losses had steadily narrowed from HK$1.6 billion in 2008, the year it started disclosing financial figures, to HK$237 million in 2011.

Legislators and analysts have blamed the park’s poor performance on its small size.It’s the smallest of Burbank, California-based Disney’s parks worldwide. But the 311-acre (126-hectare) park, set onreclaimed land on Lantau island,will be a quarter bigger once an expansion is completed later this year.

“The business has turned a corner,” said Kam. He said the park expansion was “the most critical success factor that contributed to our result this year.”

The $465 million expansion adds three new attractions that Kam said allowed the park to draw more visitors. Two have already opened, including one based on the “Toy Story” series of movies and another with a Wild West theme called “Grizzly Gulch,” which Kam said has become the park’s most popular draw. The final phase, “Mystic Point,” which has a supernatural theme and is set in a rain forest, is scheduled to open by the middle of the year.

Visits by local residents, who accounted for a third of total visitors, rose 21 per cent, while those by mainland Chinese, who make up nearly half of the total, climbed 13 per cent.

Hong Kong Disneyland opened to great fanfare in 2005, only to miss its attendance targets in the first two years.

The occupancy rate at the resort’s two hotels, which have 1,000 rooms in total, edged up by 1 percentage point to 92 per cent. Kam said the park was looking at the feasibility of expanding its hotels.

Kam shrugged off fears that a Disney theme park under construction in Shanghai will result in increased competition for Hong Kong, saying that new theme parks would only help promote the industry in Asia.

Hong Kong’s government has a 52 per cent stake in the park. The Walt Disney Co. owns the remaining 48 per cent.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/news/hong-kongs-disneyland-turns-profit-for-first-time-since-opening-in-2005/feed/0‘Artist, street organizer, Member of Parliament and mystic’http://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/artist-street-organizer-member-of-parliament-and-mystic/
http://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/artist-street-organizer-member-of-parliament-and-mystic/#respondFri, 09 Sep 2011 17:04:30 +0000http://www2.macleans.ca/?p=214241Simon de Jong, the former NDP MP who passed away last month, is remembered.As Heritage critic he once railed against Canada Post for issuing a stamp to commemorate the …

]]>Simon de Jong, the former NDP MP who passed away last month, is remembered.

As Heritage critic he once railed against Canada Post for issuing a stamp to commemorate the 25th anniversary of Disneyland. “We are losing our identity,” he argued. “We as a country are promoting a foreign, privately owned institution, a privately owned theme park, and we are promoting it on our stamps.” Among his most satisfying moments as an MP, he said, was getting Parliament to send a message of condolence to Yoko Ono when John Lennon was assassinated in 1980 and delivering a speech on disarmament to the United Nations in 1982…

After he left Parliament he moved to California, spent time in Brazil, then returned to live in British Columbia. Shortly before he died, he was asked what he would do if he was in Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s shoes. “It’s a bit facetious, but take LSD,” he said. “See some bigger pictures.”

]]>The Airline Pricing Obstacle CourseAirline pricing continues to make headlines for befuddling passengers. In the U.S., new ‘unbundled’ fees seem to appear every day. The latest is American Airlines charging from $9 to $19 for the privilege of boarding early – just after the premium passengers. Why would people pay for that dubious benefit? Mostly because high fees for checked luggage have spurred many passengers to bring only carry-on, creating a free-for-all battle for overhead bin space. In the UK and Europe, no-frills airlines continue to offer what look like jaw-dropping low fares, which can more than double when ‘optional’ fees are added. Carriers like Ryanair, easyJet and Flybe charge up to £30 to put a standard 20kg bag in the hold. Passengers also face fees for paying by credit card, printing boarding passes and selecting seats. Next month Ryanair will hike luggage costs by £10 if passengers don’t check in online. In today’s crazy airline landscape British tabloid News of the World says a ticket on British Airways can end up costing less than one on a no-frills carrier, because it doesn’t charge booking fees or to check in luggage. Here in Canada we can count ourselves lucky on some counts. Neither Air Canada nor WestJet have taken unbundling to the levels of airlines south of the border, never mind Europe. But even here, the final price of a flight can double from the advertised amount due to extra fees, fuel surcharges and government taxes. As reported this week, legislation was passed by Parliament three years ago that would force airlines to advertise the full cost of a ticket. But a last-minute amendment won by the airline lobby delayed the advertising provision until the government and industry held consultations. As another legislative session comes to a close, it appears that Transport Minister John Baird has for a second time reneged on a commitment to move the process forward. It looks like we’ll continue to need calculators to figure out the price of a flight for some time to come.

Boeing & Airbus Hear Footsteps As Competition Looms
While their own rivalry has certainly been fierce, Boeing and Airbus have pretty much enjoyed a duopoly in the large passenger aircraft market for many years. But that’s going to change as some of the fast-emerging BRIC countries – Brazil, Russia, India and China – bring their own flying machines to market. Canada is striving for a piece of the pie too, with Bombardier set to take on the big guys in the 100-149 seat market with its CSeries, set to enter service in 2013. Other competitors include China’s Comac, Brazil’s Embraer and Russian companies Sukhoi and United Aircraft Company. Almost all of the new competition will be in the narrow-body market, because of the prohibitive cost of entry for wide-body construction. The price of developing new jets like Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner or Airbus’s new A350 is estimated at more than $12 billion, making it unlikely that challengers will emerge until 2030 at the earliest. In the short-haul market, leaders Bombardier and Embraer will also see some new competition from Japan’s Mitsubishi. By 2014 the company hopes to be airborne with the first passenger aircraft to be built by a Japanese company since the mid-70s. It’s a beauty, too, with sleek lines, a dipped nose, a more spacious cabin than its competitors and perhaps most importantly, a highly fuel-efficient engine.

Water & Lights Show Is Next Step In Making Disneyland Grand
Five years in the making, a new evening water and lights show at Disney’s California Adventure in Disneyland has kicked off a $1.4 billion expansion. The 25-minute ‘World of Color’ show takes place in the Paradise Bay lagoon and features 1,200 fountains and water screens on which images of iconic Disney characters are projected. Lasers, fire, lights and music are other components of a show described by Walt Disney Parks and Resorts Chairman Tom Staggs as “exhilarating”. The growth continues with a Little Mermaid attraction opening next year and a 12-acre Cars Land that will be unveiled in 2012. The expansion marks the continuation of plans to transform the original Disneyland theme park into a multi-day resort destination. The new attractions aim to piggyback on the popularity of Disney and Disney/Pixar characters, with the goal, Disney says, of “adding product that tells a story.”

Buying A New Knee In Bangkok
Medical tourism is fast becoming a worldwide, multi-billion dollar industry. In the U.S. alone it’s currently a $20-billion market but experts predict that to multiply to $100-billion by 2012. While Americans travel to overseas hospitals in order to pay as little as 10% of what they would pay at home, Canadians are going for different reasons – mostly to avoid long wait-times for things like hip or knee replacements or cardiac surgery. In the past, the bulk of medical travel has been for cosmetic procedures, but that is quickly changing as facilities improve around the world. As reported in trade rag OpenJaw.com, travel agency marketing organization Travelsavers has been researching the market for some time and has now made the leap with the formation of Well-Being Travel. Travelsavers member agencies in Canada and the U.S. won’t sell the medical services– they’ve teamed up with a company called Companion Global Healthcare for that – but they will arrange air and hotel stays based around state-of-the-art hospitals in places like India, Thailand and Turkey. Executive vice president of Well-Being Travel Anne Marie Moebes is definitely a convert. She required dental work priced at $18,000 in the U.S. and got it for $4,000 including airfare in Central America. She says “you could eat off the floor” in its partner hospitals which included Bumrungrad International in Bangkok and Anadolu Medical Center in Istanbul.

By: Bruce Parkinson
Bruce Parkinson is a travel industry journalist and regular contributor to Takeoffeh.com as well as sister company, OpenJaw.com

]]>History, as Karl Marx’s famous dictum would have it, is supposed to be tragedy first time around, degenerating into farce only on its repeat swing. Hard then to say what the dour Marx might have made of his high-spirited fellow Communist Nikita Khrushchev and his 1959 tour across America. As described in journalist Peter Carlson’s K Blows Top (Public Affairs), even at the time the shambolic two-week affair struck many as a Cold War comic interlude, a kind of real-life rehearsal for Dr. Strangelove five years before the film. From our perspective, looking back over half a century during which East and West—thanks to MAD, that apt acronym for the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction—managed to avoid incinerating mankind, Khrushchev’s excellent adventure inspires not just laughter but nostalgia for a time when external threats did not come from shadowy organizations undeterred by the threat of retaliation. And for when the enemy had a sense of humour.

The visit must have seemed a serious event when first proposed. Khrushchev, who had slowly accumulated supreme power in the U.S.S.R. since the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953, may not have been as murderous as his predecessor. Nonetheless, he was devoid of diplomatic skills (“We will bury you”), thin-skinned, and ever ready to remind foreigners he had nuclear missiles at his beck and call. His would be the first-ever visit of a Soviet leader to America, and the prospect that he and U.S. president Dwight Eisenhower might, as the latter delicately put it, have a “mutually profitable informal exchange of views,” would have sounded hopeful to most Americans.

In the end, diplomatic progress was minimal, but in 13 days in September, Khrushchev managed to get stuck in a New York elevator, spark media riots in a San Francisco supermarket and an Iowa cornfield, ogle Shirley MacLaine on the set of Can-Can, and throw a Hollywood tantrum over being denied access to Disneyland. (That’s the particular outburst captured in Carlson’s title, taken from a newspaper headline—copy editors had great difficulty both in spelling “Khrushchev” and in fitting it into the space available; “K” and even “Krushy” often stood in for it.)

News of the visit provoked an uproar. After combing his files, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover estimated that 25,000 Americans wanted to kill Khrushchev. Still, plenty of others wanted him to drop by, meet the family, stay for supper—see, as the cliché would have it, the real America, and thereby learn to love it. Tennessee senator Estes Kefouver touted the Grand Ole Opry; an Atlantic City hotel offered free use of its penthouse (“two baths, kitchen and a Japanese houseboy”); the Apple Festival Parade in La Crescent, Minn., invited Khrushchev to drop by (“If you would like to enter a float,” the festival chairman wrote him, “please let me know”); Louis Armstrong thought “Mr. K” might like a jazz club: “He’s a cat, man,” Satchmo told a reporter, “a human being like anybody else.”

Eventually the advance men settled on Washington (White House state dinner), New York (addressing the UN), a luncheon at Twentieth Century Fox’s studios in Los Angeles, a visit to IBM in San Francisco, the Iowa corn farm of Khrushchev’s American friend Roswell Garst, a Pittsburgh steel mill, and a few days of talks at Camp David. New York’s highlight, at least for the tabloids, saw the Soviet dictator crawl out of a malfunctioning elevator in the elegant Waldorf-Astoria, his ample rump shoved from behind by Henry Cabot Lodge, U.S. ambassador to the UN and the diplomat in charge of this travelling circus.

While the East Coast had its moments, matters didn’t become truly memorable until the tour reached Hollywood. The film world turned itself inside out over its distinguished visitor. Stars frightened to be seen eating with a Communist screenwriter fought to get into Fox’s 400-seat commissary to dine with a Communist dictator. Only a few Cold Warriors, including Ronald Reagan, turned down the invitation, while Marilyn Monroe was dragooned into attending. Her studio bosses told her, according to the actress’s maid years later, that Russians knew only two things about America—Coca-Cola and Marilyn Monroe—and that she had to show up, in her “tightest, sexiest dress.” Others who came included Frank Sinatra, Judy Garland and Gary Cooper. (After the meal, Khrushchev, who had spent a lot of late nights watching Westerns with Stalin, an insomniac aficionado of the genre, had a long conversation with Cooper, an Oscar-winner for High Noon.) To counter Soviet denunciations of U.S. racial prejudice, black stars like Nat “King” Cole were also invited, making the luncheon Hollywood’s first integrated A-list party ever, according to one contemporary journalist.

It all went well until LAPD chief William Parker, spooked by a tomato tossed at Khrushchev’s car (it missed, splattering the chief’s vehicle instead), announced that he couldn’t guarantee security if the Soviets went ahead with a side excursion to Disneyland. So Lodge called it off, and a small volcano started building within his guest. After 45 minutes of rambling, post-lunch remarks, Khrushchev’s face grew red as he turned to the topic of Disneyland. “What is it? Is there an epidemic of cholera? Have gangsters taken hold of the place? What must I do, commit suicide?”

His audience, as accustomed to egocentric temper tantrums as any in the world, was unfazed; the visitor himself seemed calm afterwards as he toured the Can-Can set, watching male dancers slide under the skirts of female dancers and emerge clutching what appeared to be their red panties. Perhaps he was being a good guest, or merely happy that he had met Monroe. (“He looked on me the way a man looks on a woman,” she later said. And what, her maid asked, did the star make of the dictator? “He was fat and ugly and had warts on his face and he growled.”) But afterwards, when Khrushchev was embarrassed by being photographed grinning goofily at MacLaine, he denounced Can-Can as decadent bourgeois pornography, telling reporters that “mankind’s face is more beautiful than its backside.”

The rest of the Los Angeles leg went no better. Anti-Communist remarks from right-wing Republican mayor Norris Poulson provoked another bulging-vein outburst, a public threat to go home and ramp up the arms race. That one did scare Khrushchev’s audience: “You could see the fuses of nuclear rockets sparking,” wrote Harrison Salisbury in the New York Times. But again K calmed down. Poulson had “tried to let out a little fart,” he told Lodge, “instead he just s–t in his pants.” The American was glad to get out of town, and even happier that San Francisco began well, with an incident-free visit to IBM. Too bad, then, about the supermarket.

America’s capitalist cheerleaders had been angling all along to get their visitor into a supermarket, the very icon of U.S. abundance, to show up Soviet rationing and scarcity. Now they had their wish as Khrushchev and a cadre of bodyguards sauntered into Quality Foods. Unfortunately, the bodyguards, congenitally disturbed by the presence of unauthorized persons—in this case bewildered shoppers—locked arms in a circle around their charge. That in turn blocked photographers and cameramen from getting their shots, and the media riot was on. One photog hopped a stack of butter packets, squishing most; another climbed shelves filled with jars of instant coffee, knocking them to the floor in a cascade of glass splinters; a third jumped on a meat counter only to be tackled by an incensed butcher yelling “get off my chickens!”; another, even more desperate than his fellows, simply crashed through the deli counter, and stomped across the salami and cheese, to shoot Khrushchev chatting with the shell-shocked store manager.

By the time the circus reached Iowa, everyone—with the notable exception of Khrushchev himself—was showing the strain. Two of Lodge’s underlings had collapsed; one locked himself in his hotel room and took the phone off the hook. Reporters, never the most gracious of travellers, were fighting with cops. The stage was set for the next media brawl when the tour arrived at Garst’s farm. What bound Garst and Khrushchev together was a shared, almost mystical, belief in the beauty, splendour and wonder of corn. They had been pals since 1955 when Garst first visited the U.S.S.R. to sell his hybrid varieties. They were very much alike: ham actors to the core, capable of eating, drinking and talking—especially about corn—for hours.

One key difference, though, was that Khrushchev was aware, more than many a contemporary democratic politician, of the importance of playing to the media, especially the TV cameras. Garst not so much. The sight of journalists trampling his corn as they closed in on Khrushchev sent him into a frenzy. First he kicked the nearest vandal—the Times’ Salisbury—in the shins, then he began throwing wet silage at the rest. But these were the combat-tested veterans of the Battle of Quality Foods, and they held their ground long enough to snap photos of a bug-eyed Garst and a smiling Khrushchev.

The tour eventually made it back to Washington for its almost forgotten main purpose, the talks at Camp David. Little was accomplished, but at least it was done in due sobriety. As Khrushchev flew home, dazed survivors in the press corps were left groping for words to describe what had happened. Associated Press reporter Seth Pett’s summation of the supermarket fiasco, expressed in the idiom of the day, could well have stood for the entire two weeks: “It was like happy hour in a manic depressive ward, like the year of the locusts, like, crazy, man.”